Monday, July 26, 2010

New Job for Shirley Sherrod

President Obama, please give Shirley Sherrod a new job. Please read Maureen Dowd's article in the New York Times.

Here are some excerpts:

“I don’t think a single black person was consulted before Shirley Sherrod was fired — I mean c’mon, “ said Congressman James Clyburn of South Carolina, a black lawmaker so temperate that he agreed with an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal on Friday by Senator James Webb of Virginia, which urged that “government-directed diversity programs should end.”

“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” Clyburn told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”

Eleanor Holmes Norton, D.C.’s House delegate, agreed: “The president needs some advisers or friends who have a greater sense of the pulse of the African-American community, or who at least have been around the mulberry bush.”

And, one last one ... this blog supports this idea wholeheartedly:

The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one.

Vatican Leaders and Mel Gibson

Vatican Leaders: Women Priests and Pedophiles, Part 2

Of course, my evil twin (or maybe my more honest self) says: "Let those asshole Vatican leaders run the church into the ground. Good riddance to bad rubbish." The leaders of the church have done so many horrific things over the centuries. The pope is a dictator -- who wants to pledge alligiance to that?

Read The Vatican Empire by Nino Lo Bello ... still relevant even though it was written in the late 60's -- the author talks about the enormous wealth of the Catholic Church. (And they have the nerve to beg money on the pulpit on Sundays. Actually, my family's parish priest used to yell from the pulpit about all the slackers who weren't putting in their donation envelopes ... or were putting in too little.)

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Vatican Leaders: Women Priests and Pedophiles

It's really time for Catholic women to take back their church. Those bishops and cardinals ... ya gotta wonder. WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?

The New York Times reports that Vatican leaders have essentially equated ordaining women as priests as grave an infraction as priests molesting children. Here's an excerpt:

The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on Thursday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.

The overall document codified existing procedures that allow the Vatican to try priests accused of child sexual abuse using faster juridical procedures rather than full ecclesiastical trials. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the changes showed the church’s commitment to tackling child sexual abuse with “rigor and transparency.”

Those measures fell short of the hopes of many advocates for victims of priestly abuse, who dismissed them as “tweaking” rather than a bold overhaul. The new rules do not, for example, hold bishops accountable for abuse by priests on their watch, nor do they require them to report sexual abuse to civil authorities — though less formal “guidelines” issued earlier this year encourage reporting if local law compels it.

But what astonished many Catholics was the inclusion of the attempt to ordain women in a list of the “more grave delicts,” or offenses, which included pedophilia, as well as heresy, apostasy and schism. The issue, some critics said, was less the ordination of women, which is not discussed seriously inside the church hierarchy, but the Vatican’s suggestion that pedophilia is a comparable sin in a document billed a response to the sexual abuse crisis, which roared back from remission in Europe this spring a decade after it first erupted in the United States.

“It is very irritating that they put the increased severity in punishment for abuse and women’s ordination at the same level,” said Christian Weisner, the spokesman for “We Are Church,” a liberal Catholic reform movement founded in 1996 in response to a high-profile sexual abuse case in Austria. “It tells us that the church still understands itself as an environment dominated by men.”

Sunday, July 11, 2010

When You're Strange: Mini Review

The other night I watched When You're Strange -- the documentary about The Doors written and directed by Tom DiCillo. DiCillo wrote and directed one of my favorite films: Living in Oblivion, which I highly recommend. I used to be a big fan of The Doors. Still am but just don't listen to them that often. So, I was really looking forward to this documentary. It also got good reviews. But, folks, I was disappointed in this one. If you want a walk down memory lane -- and only that -- you'll be happy. I wanted more. Joan Rivers said in today's Parade magazine: "I hate documentaries that tell you nothing about the person." I go further: "I hate documentaries that tell you nothing new about the person." And that's this movie.